- Editors do more thorough evaluations on manuscripts, and their decisions on a paper is crucial to the editorial process. The editors’ decisions on a paper for publication should be based majorly on the paper’s importance, originality, and clarity, and the study’s relevance to the subject area(s) of the journal.
- Based on the research interest (or) subject, the editor will assign submitted manuscript to a reviewer for the peer review process
- The Editor must evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to the race, color, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the author(s).
- The Editor should not disclose any information about a manuscript under consideration to anyone other than the author(s), reviewers, and potential reviewers.
- The Editor must approve every effort to ensure the integrity of the blind review process by not revealing the identity of the author(s) of a manuscript to the reviewers of that manuscript, and vice versa.
- The management team of the journal has the right and authority to accept a paper for publication or to reject it, after the recommendation of the editor(s).
- If the Editor recommends “Review Again after Minor Changes,” the authors are notified to prepare and submit a final copy of their manuscript with the required minor changes suggested by the reviewers. Only the Editor, and not the external reviewers, reviews the revised manuscript after the minor changes have been made by the authors. Once the Editor is satisfied with the final manuscript, the manuscript can be accepted.
- The editors should take suspected cases of plagiarism seriously.
- If the Editor recommends rejecting the manuscript, the rejection is immediate. Also, if two of the reviewers recommend rejecting the manuscript, the rejection is immediate.
- The editorial workflow gives the Editors the authority in rejecting any manuscript because of inappropriateness of its subject, lack of quality, or incorrectness of its results. The Editor cannot assign himself/herself as an external reviewer of the manuscript.
- The editor should respect the intellectual independence of authors. The information, arguments, or interpretations in an unpublished manuscript should not be used in an editor’s own research without the consent of the author.
- The editorial duty for any manuscript authored by the editor and submitted to the journal should be passed on to some other qualified editorial team members. The editor should prevent situations of real or perceived conflicts of interest. Such conflicts can also include, handling papers from students or colleagues with whom the editor has recently worked together, and from those in the same institution.
This is to ensure a high-quality, fair, and unbiased peer-review process of every manuscript submitted to the journal, since any manuscript must be recommended by one or more (usually two or more) external reviewers along with the Editor in charge of the manuscript in order for it to be accepted for publication in the journal.